Category Archives: technology

Colorado Water Resources

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A few months ago I did some research and wrote some blog postings about hydroelectricity in Colorado. I had been asked by my friend, Bevan, whether we were failing to take advantage of the hydroelectric power that was available from the rivers in Colorado simply because of the political issues associated with damming our beautiful river canyons. In doing this research, I found that we do, in fact, harvest some of the hydro power and, due to the fact that the flow rates of these rivers are not large or consistent, we would not really gain much power generating capacity even if we extracted all of their theoretical hydroelectric energy.

One of the most fascinating public projects I read about during my hydroelectric research is the Colorado Big Thompson water diversion project. Using a series of tunnels, pipes, canals, reservoirs and pumping stations, this project collects and diverts water from west of the continental divide and brings it to the eastern slope. About 70% of the population of Colorado lives along the Front Range, yet 70% of the precipitation falls on the western side of the continental divide. The C-BT project provides about 213,000 acre feet of water to the eastern slope each year. Nearly all of this water has its energy extracted through a series of electric generating stations with a combined capacity of 162 MW. That’s enough electricity for about 80,000 homes. It also provides enough water for about 425,000 homes. To put it in perspective, the C-BT project delivers more water to the Front Range than both the Big Thompson and Cache la Poudre rivers combined.

An acre-foot of water is about 326,000 gallons. Each household in Colorado uses about .5 acre feet per year which about 13,600 gallons per month. This is about 30% more than the national average, which is due to the need to irrigate our lawns. Colorado has a very dry climate and in order to have a lawn and shrubbery, they must be irrigated. It made me wonder how much water we use for things that are essential compared with uses those that are not essential, such as growing lawns.

A general rule of thumb is that each person in the U.S. uses about 50 gallons of water per day. You can estimate your daily consumption by visiting a USGS site and using their calculator. The calculator uses the following values for personal water consumption:

  • Bath: 50 gallons
  • Shower: 2 gallons per minute
  • Teeth brushing: 1 gallon
  • Hands/face washing: 1 gallon
  • Face/leg shaving: 1 gallon
  • Dishwasher: 20 gallons/load
  • Dishwashing by hand: 5 gallons/load
  • Clothes washing (machine): 10 gallons/load
  • Toilet flush: 3 gallons
  • Glasses of water: 8 oz. per glass (1/16th of a gallon)

Another way measure your household’s water consumption is to look at one of your water bills from a winter month. I found that our water consumption comes out very close to the estimate of 50 gallons/person per day. The real shocker for me was looking at a summer water bill and comparing it to a winter water bill. Our summer water consumption goes up by a factor of 10! For about 4 months out of the year we need to run the sprinkler system and its water consumption dwarfs the amount of water for personal use during those months. Overall, watering our lawn for those 4 month accounts for more than 65% of our annual water consumption!

I began to wonder what this is costing us so I began to study our water bills. Interpreting utility bills is not always easy. There are sometimes so many charges that it’s hard to tell what drives the overall cost. I had to call our city’s water department to figure out how the charges are computed. In the case of our water bill, there are three charges. The first is for the storm sewer, which is based on the size of the property. The second is for the regular sewer bill, which is determined by water consumption during a winter month to eliminate the effect of irrigation water, which doesn’t return to the sewer. The last is the cost of the water used based on a meter reading to measure actual water consumption. Included in the water charge is a flat connection charge, which is around $8/month. When you combine the two sewer charges of $18 with this $8 charge my water bill is already at $26/month before I’ve purchased my first gallon.

The cost per 1000 gallons of water in Greeley is $2.41, which is about the average in U.S.. That’s up about 40% from what we were paying 6 years ago, so it’s been increasing faster than inflation. For those of you in other countries who measure water in cu. meters, there are about 264 gallons per cu. meter.

I visited the manufacturer’s web site for my sprinkler system and found out that each 360-degree sprinkler nozzle uses about 3 gallons per minute. The quarter and half nozzles use proportionally less water per minute. I have 9 sprinkling zones each with a total of about 5 “360-degree equivalent” heads, so when I’m watering my lawn, I’m using about 15 GPM. My watering cycle takes 3 hours so that comes out to 2700 gallons. At the $2.41/1000 gallon cost, it costs about $6.50 each time the sprinkler cycles. We’re restricted to 3 days a week that we can water the lawn, so that adds about $80/month for watering the lawn in the summer time. Now that I know how much each watering costs, I’m being more vigilant about using the timer’s ‘rain’ button to suspend watering when we’ve just gotten some rain. I’ve even been looking at the weather forecast to see if it makes sense to skip a cycle if rain is predicted.

Sometimes people have asked if we can do something more intelligent when it comes to watering lawns, such as using ‘gray water’, i.e., the water that would normally be sent to the sewer and directing it to water the lawn instead. That might work for water that is lightly contaminated such as water from a shower or dishwasher, but there is no easy way to separate that from the other contaminated water that you (and your neighbors) wouldn’t want on your lawn. We also need to consider that waste water from inside the house is eventually treated and put back in rivers where it can be used downstream. Also, now that I know that it takes 10 times as much water to keep the lawn green as the amount we need for personal use, I can see that recycling gray water would hardly put a dent in one’s overall water consumption.

How about collecting rain water from the roof and other surfaces and storing it? In my case, only about a third of our 1/2 acre lot has grass on it. The rest is covered with impervious surfaces like the house, concrete patios, the driveway, and landscaping rock. If it were possible to capture the rain water, would this work to offset or even eliminate a watering bill? I did the calculations and there does appear to be enough precipitation that falls on this lot (about .5 acre-foot per year) to supply all of our watering needs. However, to store and treat this water would not be practical. A single lawn watering takes 2700 gallons which comes out to 8000 gallons per week. Since it can sometimes go for weeks without any significant rain during the summer, we’d likely need a 20,000 gallon storage tank to store $50 worth of water. Then you have to consider that it would take chemicals to keep it from turning into a bacteria pond and it’s easy to see why cisterns have never proved to be very popular when tap water is available. There are even laws about capturing one’s own rain water in Colorado since water rights and property are separate and so it is against the law to capture and hold your own property’s rain water. Here’s an article about water harvesting in Colorado that contains more information about it.

The other option is
xeriscaping which means having a lawn with plants that can survive with no supplemental irrigation water. However, this is not always possible and the attractiveness of this approach will no doubt vary with the eye of the beholder. My friend Peter lives in a subdivision where the covenants require the residents to have a certain percentage of green grass in their lawns. Some people say that they love the look of natural desert, but to be honest, it’s only beautiful at a distance. The natural ground cover on Colorado’s Front Range is mostly noxious weeds full of pointy things that will pierce your skin. There is not much attractive about what grows on Colorado’s Front Range naturally. Most people think of Colorado as beautiful mountains filled with Aspen and pine trees. That all starts about 30 miles to the west. Most of us live on the plains.

The availability of water is starting to limit growth in this area and if we get a serious drought, it will likely cause a further restrictions on new growth. The new water tap connection fees are already in excess of $14,000 per home in Greeley.

People like living in dry climates because it’s almost always sunny and there’s very little humidity. But we all need water to survive and to create an attractive environment. We all like having green grass and shade trees nearby. We have plenty of land in Colorado for future growth, but not enough water to support unrestricted growth. Every gallon of water I conserve will likely get used up by some new construction project that is enabled by the water’s newfound availability. It’s quite a dilemma about what to do when it comes to water conservation. Everyone wants to do their part, but if the reward for it is more growth and more people, then that takes some of the incentive out of it. We could grow the population of Colorado until we’re all walking around in stillsuits, but what good would that be?

Having said that, I do realize that certain industries like construction depend on new growth to survive. I hate to be like the people who, once they have found a promised land, put up a no trespassing sign and tell everyone else to stay out. That’s not an uncommon sentiment to hear people express in this area. The city of Boulder has had an anti-growth policy for many years. Everyone wants to be the last one in.

Colorado is somewhat unique among the dry western states because we have areas in the state that get in excess of 50 inches of precipitation per year and areas that get less than 10 inches per year. Most of the areas where people live get between 10 to 15 inches per year, which is not enough to grow much more than cactus, thistles, and tumble weeds. To put it in perspective, states east of the Mississippi get between 40 to 50 inches of precipitation per year and it’s quite consistent throughout the region. When you get over about 40 inches per year, it’s usually not necessary to irrigate one’s lawn. In Colorado, most of the high precipitation areas are the mountain peaks, which tend to hold the precipitation throughout the winter in the form of snow and release it gradually during the spring runoff. This runoff is captured in a number of reservoirs and used during the dry summer months for residential, commercial, and agricultural use. It’s a very delicate balance that requires carefully matching the supply with the demand.

The problem with precipitation is that it is local and seasonal. In other words, it’s difficult to match the amount of precipitation you get with where you need it, when you need it. And that problem is compounded in states like Colorado where the population and seasonal effects of precipitation are not matched very well. We need to be very resourceful about how we collect, distribute, and use the water resources we have. And one must not underestimate the beneficial environmental impact of paving corn fields and constructing strip malls in their place, an activity that has continued unabated in Colorado over the past decade.

That leads me to my last observation. Is agriculture on a high desert plain an intelligent use of land and water? I’m sure that for people who are involved in farming that they’d consider it to be the most beneficial use of the land. They’ll no doubt maintain that attitude until someone offers them several hundred years’ of annual farming profits for the property to construct a residential neighborhood or a strip mall on the land. In the case of high density living where one builds apartments, this would definitely qualify as a net water savings. Irrigated crops in this region take about 1.3 acre-feet of irrigation water per acre on the average, whereas if you put about 12 people on that acre, it would take less than half of the amount of water, especially if you pack them in so that you don’t have much lawn to water. If you pave the parking lot and streets around the neighborhood, all the better, because the water that falls on it can be collected and used elsewhere. Similarly, virtually all the water that crops use evaporates, but most of the water people use gets treated and put back in the river just a few miles away, so it can be used downstream. I do realize that water that evaporates will eventually get recycled, but unlike a river, it’s a lot harder to maintain claim to it once it goes into the sky.

So it would appear that for every acre of agriculture we give up, we can jam another 12 residents into Colorado. Then all we need to do is find some jobs for them.

Geocaching

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During my first year at Penn State’s Wilkes-Barre campus, I took a physical education class called orienteering. The PSU Wilkes-Barre campus is located near Lake Lehman, PA in a rural, wooded area surrounded by fields and farms. The main building on the campus, called the Hayfield House, was previously a country estate that has been converted into classrooms and offices. The campus is visually breathtaking.

The Hayfield House at PSU’s Wilkes-Barre campus

The orienteering class required us to use a topographic map and a compass to find a series of flags hidden in the surrounding woods and copy down numbers from them. It was essentially a timed race to see who would find them all and get back to the starting point in the shortest time. It was great exercise, because you covered a lot of terrain in a short time and it had an element of fun to it because you had to think at the same time you were running. Plus, it was all outdoors in a beautiful setting. I still have many fond memories of exploring the countryside around the PSU W-B campus during that class.

A few weeks ago during one of our regular neighborhood walks, Terri and I found a couple looking for something using a GPS. I asked them if they were geocaching and they told me they were attempting to find their very first geocache. I had heard about geocaching a few years ago from my friend Kyle, but I had never seen anyone doing it. We helped them for a few minutes, but we didn’t find the cache. GPS units are accurate to about 30 feet, and so it can sometimes be a challenge to find a small geocache, especially if it is well concealed. I learned later from a geocaching website that they eventually located it. It was knowing that they found it that convinced me to give it a try.

GPS signals were not always so accurate. Or, I should say, they were not so accurate for civilian GPS receivers. At one time, civilian GPS receivers were only accurate to about 300 feet. The military intentionally added random noise to the GPS signal which only military receivers could remove. On May 1st, 2000, the Clinton administration turned off this random noise, called ‘selective availability’, and over night civilian receivers had their accuracy improved 10 fold. The removal of SA along with the availability of inexpensive handheld GPS receivers and geocaching websites has made geocaching possible.

The brief description of geocaching is that someone hides a cache, which is usually a weatherproof container. The cache can be as small as a bullet-sized container or as large as a metal ammo box. The person who hides it posts the container’s GPS coordinates on a website that contains a database of geocaches. The first and largest of these websites is geocaching.com which was started in 2000. It contains the locations of more than 500,000 caches around the world. The person who hides the cache includes a ‘log book’ in it to let those who find it log their username along with the date and a comment. In the small containers like the ever popular 35 mm film canisters, (which are usually covered with camouflage tape), the log is just a small scroll rolled up inside. Some of the caches contain trinkets and, if you’re so inclined, you can take a trinket and leave one of your own. There are also some special serialized tags and coins that are unique to geocaching that you can move from cache to cache and the website can keep track of the object’s whereabouts. Each cache has a unique identifier that starts with the letters ‘GC’. The subsequent characters are assigned by the website at the time the cache is registered. The person hiding the cache usually gives it a clever name and possibly a clue to help locate it. When you set up an account on geocaching.com, you select a unique user ID and you are able to log your discoveries of the geocaches. The geocaching.com website accounts are free, but you can also get a paid account for $3/month that has more features.

The website allows you to download the cache coordinates to your GPS which is a great convenience. I downloaded a free program called EasyGPS and that will take a file of geocache locations and put them on my Garmin eMap GPS. You can enter the coordinates by hand too, which is what I did for the first few caches, but it takes much more time to do that and can be a source of error.

A screen shot of EasyGPS along with a route I uploaded from the GPS on a recent bicycle ride. Click on the image to get a full screen version.

Inside the city of Greeley, CO which has a population of around 87,000 people, there are more than 70 caches hidden. Some of them are elaborate ‘multicaches’ which have clues in them so that you may have to find 3 or 4 caches before you can find the coordinates to the main cache. Some even have quizzes based on subjects like math or history that makes finding the final cache that much more challenging. Within a 10 mile radius of my home, there are nearly 200 geocaches hidden.

Terri and I have been looking for caches lately and we’ve managed to find 14 just in the area where we take our regular walks. I’ve put a GPS handlebar mount on my bicycle and now that we’ve found most of the caches within easy walking distance of our house, I’ve been planning to venture out to find the more of them on the bicycle and to get some exercise in the process.

Garmin eMap mounted on my mountain bike’s handlebars

People who like to work with technology can spend an inordinate amount of time indoors, often sitting in front of a computer. Geocaching requires you to get outside, get some exercise, and do some exploring. If you have a GPS, I’d recommend you give it a try. Will you feel funny doing it? Oh yes, you’ll feel like an idiot at times, especially if there are any ‘mugglers’ in the area. A muggler is a non-geocacher who will stare at you and make you feel odd, and who among us can’t use a little more of that? You’ll get to learn a whole new language too, such as abbreviations that you will put in your on-line log like ‘SL’ (signed log), and ‘TFTC’ (thanks for the cache), and ‘TNLN’ (took nothing left nothing), and it’s hard to put a price on knowing an obscure lingo like that. šŸ™‚

Replacing Remington and Norelco Shaver Batteries

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I came to the realization that I’ve never worn out a Norelco or Remington razor yet I’ve owned a number of them over the years. But I have worn out a number of shaver batteries. My first Norelco razor was a plug-in only model. I was lured into buying a battery-powered model that would let me shave without being tethered to the wall outlet. Over the course of a year or so, I noticed that the charge on the battery wasn’t lasting very long and so this eventually became no different than the model that had to be connected to the AC outlet all the time. I bought a replacement when I was planning a camping trip and would not have dependable access to an AC outlet. Over the course of a few years, this model did the same thing, i.e., its batteries wore out and it also had to be plugged in all the time.

At the time, I priced a service that would replace the batteries and figured out, like many others, I’m sure, that it wasn’t much more expensive to buy a new razor than to repair an old one. So I opted to get a Remington R9190 model that I could clean by running it under the water tap. What would they think of next? It had amazing capacity, providing 60 minutes of shaving on a single charge. However, after about 18 months, it too, needed to be left plugged in all the time.

I figured that these razors only needed new batteries, but knew that it would require getting the right kind of batteries, and then having to do some unsoldering and re-soldering. I found a website that sold shaver batteries and would provide the correct ones for the razors based on their model numbers. In this case, the razor model numbers I wanted to fix were a Norelco 6843XL and a Remington R9190. I found the battery packs at Electricshaver.com. In the case of the 6843XL, I received a single AA 600 mah NiCad battery with solder tabs at a cost of $9.95. The R9190 battery pack contained a pair of AA NiCads with solder tabs that were joined together at one end. I had to cut these apart to actually install them so it probably would have been better if they just provided two AA solder tab batteries. That battery pack cost $14.95. I realized afterwards that I could probably just have just ordered 3 regular solder tab AA NiCad batteries from any of a number of Internet sources for around $3.00 each and saved about $15. Live and learn.

The Norelco 6843XL came apart quite easily. I just removed two screws (although I did need to use a torx driver) and then popped its snap joints apart. The battery tabs of the single AA battery were soldered through the PC board, but with a solder sucker and some solder wick, they were easily removed and the battery was replaced.

The Norelco 6843XL was easy to take apart. It contained a single AA solder-tab battery.

The R9190 wasn’t as easy to disassemble. There were 4 exposed phillips head screws which I removed, but the casing still would not come apart. After a lot of time fiddling, I found that there were two more hidden screws under the rubber backing and once these were removed, everything came apart. It was first necessary to pry up the corners of the rubber backing which was glued down on the back of the shaver (as shown in the photo) to expose the hidden screws. I came close to giving up on it. It’s the reason you may have found this posting, because searching for ‘Remington R9100 R9190 R9200 shaver battery replacement’ came up with nothing on the Internet. So I figure that within a few weeks of posting this, it will start to get hits because if I’m having this problem, chances are pretty good that others are as well.

The R9190 had two hidden screws keeping it together. After prying up the rubber as shown in the photo, the screws were exposed.

The main reason I’m posting this is because I know how much I appreciate it when I find some obscure piece of information on the Internet that allows me to fix something that I’d otherwise have to throw away. I’m disappointed that Norelco and Remington continue to build products whose batteries cannot be easily serviced. I’ve read recently that many cellphones get replaced when their batteries goes bad after around 18 months of use. I find that to be extremely wasteful, and in the case of most cellphones, completely unnecessary because the batteries are generally easily replaced (unless you have an iPhone) . Of course, the battery packs sometimes have excessive markups on them when purchased from the manufacturer so that probably contributes to it as well.

I think that building batteries into a product in such a way that they cannot be replaced by an end user is unacceptable. Rechargeable batteries are only good for around 500 charge cycles and then they must be replaced. I wouldn’t want to be associated with a product where the batteries are so difficult to replace that the battery life determines the useful life of the product.

The R9190 has two AA NiCad batteries soldered together with some wiring. They are relatively easy to replace once you figure out how to get the case apart.

Both shavers are working great now and I can again enjoy the experience of untethered shaving.

UPDATE 2009-01-25

I continue to get a lot of hits on this web page so I can only imagine that many people have encountered the same problem, i.e., a razor that is still working, but with batteries that have gone flat. A very nice gentleman sent me the images below complete with annotations to show how he repaired his Remington Model 8100 razor. He replaced the solder tail AA batteries with holders for AAA batteries. Even though AAA batteries are much smaller, and usually have half the capacity of AA batteries, he found some that had nearly equal capacity to the AA batteries he replaced. The best part of his repair is that the next time they go flat, it will be very easy to replace them because it will require no soldering.

UPDATE 2012-02-26: I continue to have readers send me tips and photos on razors that are a bit different than the ones shown above. In this case John H. was kind enough to put together an 8-step sequence on how to get to the batteries on the Remington M280 M290 style razors:

MS-290_Step1.jpg

MS-290_Step2.jpg

MS-290_Step3.jpg

MS-290_Step4.jpg

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MS-290_Step6.jpg

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MS-290_Step8.jpg

Electric Scooters and 3-Wheeled Fantasies

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Back in 1987, on a cold January day, I found a Harley-Davidson ElectraGlide Classic advertised in the local newspaper.I had known from a relatively young age that the one thing separating me from true and everlasting happiness was owning a Harley-Davidson motorcycle. And so, with that in mind, I embarked on the pursuit of making that bike mine. It had been repossessed and was owned by the local bank, and they only wanted to get the bad loan off their books, so they did little to properly advertise the bike. It was in a shop in an out-of-the way place and so I went over to take a look at it. It was in very good condition, only 3 years old and had the highly desirable 80 cu. inch Evolution V-twin engine which was new for the 1984 model year. It also had an accessory that was not on my ā€˜must haveā€™ list, namely, a sidecar. I always felt a sidecar looked somewhat odd on a motorcycle, but I reasoned that if I could get the bike for a price that made the sidecar look virtually ā€˜freeā€™, it would be a good deal because I could always sell the sidecar separately. New sidecars added about $3500 to the cost of a Harley at the time. So I put in a bid slightly below the motorcycleā€™s book value and in a relatively short time, the bike was in my garage.

The first thing I noticed about riding a bike with a sidecar was that it felt very strange going around corners. Previously, cornering was an exhilarating experience on a motorcycle, but with the sidecar, it became a chore because I felt like I was being thrown off the bike. When turning right, going a little too fast could actually bring the sidecarā€™s wheel off the ground. I decided that the sidecar, as novel as it looked, took much of the joy out of riding and I promptly removed it. For the next 8 years, the sidecar sat idle while I rode the bike without it. Finally, I sold the sidecar to someone who wanted it, content that Iā€™d never use it again.

I eventually sold the Harley too, after 16 years of owning it, for approximately what I paid for it, around $7500. For those of you who think Iā€™m a shrewd investor, if I used the $7500 and purchased Harley stock instead of that bike, the stockā€™s value over the same period would have been worth nearly $400,000, so the bike wasnā€™t really a great investment compared with owning a part of the Harley Davidson company. But ā€œ50-baggerā€ stocks are few and far between and Harley stock has now been flat for about the past 7 years. However, the same amount of money invested in the S&P index would have yielded about $40,000 over the same 16-year period, so again, the Harley would hardly qualify as an ‘investment’.

Here are the lessons I learned from it:

1. There is no one material thing that separates you from true happiness.

2. When you think there is, take the money and buy a stock market index fund instead.

3. Continue searching for the one and only thing that separates you from true happiness.

The reason I mention this experience is because Iā€™ve been contemplating alternative modes of transportation and trying to imagine what a fuel-efficient futuristic vehicle might look like. I spend about 7 months of the year riding my BMW1150RT motorcycle, which was my mid-life crisis replacement for the Harley. I do really enjoy riding it. But for the other 5 months, I need something that can deal with cold weather and snow typical of Colorado winters. Many, if not most, of my cold weather trips are made solo, which means I could use a two-place vehicle like a motorcycle since I donā€™t need all the room afforded by an SUV. Ideally, it would have very little frontal area and would need to be fully enclosed. Most critically, it would need to be able to lean into turns. Oh, and I must look cool while riding/driving it. I almost forgot to mention that, but itā€™s probably more important than any other consideration for most people.

I thought I saw the future of transportation at Epcot nearly 20 years ago when I saw the ā€˜Lean Machineā€™ , a fully-enclosed 3-wheel vehicle that looked very much like what I just described and capable of leaning into corners. But the machine was designed by GM and they apparently opted not to pursue it, probably because the public was more interested in buying SUVs, trucks, and Hummers than single-seat quirky vehicles with excellent fuel economy.

Now that gas is heading toward $4/gallon with no end in sight, fuel economy is starting to appear on everyoneā€™s radar screen again as a desirable attribute in a vehicle.

An electric motor scooter was profiled in the ‘First Ride’ section of the latest issue of Motorcyclist magazine and it got me to thinking about whether it may be just the right time for an electric motorcycle or possibly a futuristic 3-wheel leaning vehicle to come to the market. The electric motor scooter profiled is called the Vectrix Maxi-Scooter and it has an electric 20 KW (26.8 HP) motor, along with a 200lb., 3.7 kWh battery. Simple math will tell you that this battery would hold about 11 minutes of juice if you were able to run the vehicle at full power, although that probably wouldnā€™t be possible to do unless you were climbing up a hill at full speed. The company states that the scooter will get between 20 to 60 miles per charge depending on how itā€™s driven. A charge takes 2 hours to get to 80% battery capacity. The author in the Motorcyclist article got 40 miles from a charge. So it would stand to reason that average riding consumes about 95 Wh per mile. To put that in perspective, itā€™s the same as using 1 oz. of gasoline per mile assuming a 30% thermal conversion efficiency in an internal combustion engine. You donā€™t need a calculator to realize this is the equivalent of 128 mpg. The entire battery holds about the same amount of energy as 1/3 of a gallon of gasoline, again assuming a 30% thermal conversion efficiency. Since 1/3 of a gallon of gasoline weighs about 2 lbs., the energy density ratio of the NiMH battery to gasoline is 1:100. Herein lies the biggest problem with electric vehicle energy storage and that is energy density or lack thereof. The 200 lb battery accounts for 43% of the scooterā€™s 462 lb weight. That’s a nearly identical battery-to-vehicle weight ratio of the GM EV1 that I wrote about previously. With an MSRP of nearly $12K, this scooter costs about twice what an equivalent gas powered scooter would cost.

I have a confession to make. I like riding scooters. I didnā€™t think I would, but Terri and I rented one our honeymoon and we explored most of Grand Cayman on it. I know that I donā€™t look cool on a motor scooter — no guy does — but I had already landed the girl, and she didnā€™t seem to mind, so I figured, ā€œWhat the heck? I might as well enjoy it.ā€ We rented a scooter in Tuscany and loved it too, especially on the back country roads between Florence and Sienna. We did find ourselves forc
ed to use the autostrada while on a jaunt over to Pisa and the 125cc engine strained to keep up with the flow of traffic. So when no one is watching, Iā€™ll ride a scooter, preferably with a full-faced helmet and dark face shield, so no one will recognize me.

But Iā€™ve tasted what itā€™s like to ride Ducati and when you pull up at a stop light on a bike like that, everyone just stares, mouths agape, and itā€™s then that you know youā€™ve truly arrived. Women want you, men want to be you. You canā€™t overestimate the psychic value of looking cool on your ride.

So how can we solve the fuel economy/cool factor/all-weather transportation needs of the future? Well, the primary issue is the coolness factor. It has to look cool, not geeky, and be quick too, because the coolness factor will wear off quickly if youā€™re getting passed by bicycles. Secondly, It must lean into corners, because if it doesnā€™t, it will either need to be wide or unstable. Third, it must be enclosed for cold weather. That means it needs either three wheels or outrigger wheels that deploy when stopping to keep you from tipping over. Iā€™ve seen a few examples of the latter, but for some odd reason they all cost upward of $100K. It could be an all-electric vehicle, but not if it requires gobs of weight in batteries. So I think that means that it may need to be a hybrid.

Iā€™ve seen a few promising examples of what Iā€™ve described and Iā€™ll show some pictures and links here:

Venture is an American licensee of the leaning technology developed by the Dutch company Carver. Make sure to visit their website and watch the videos, most of which are of the Carver.

Carver seems like itā€™s ahead of the game here, with vehicles available for sale, although at a hair-raising price of ā‚¬50,000 (about U.S. $75,000)

And the Carver can really lean over dramatically

BMW even seems to have at least a concept version of a 3-wheel vehicle called the ‘Clever’.

The vehicle of my dreams may be available today, but itā€™s priced beyond what Iā€™m willing to pay. For now I guess Iā€™ll have to be content to ride a 45-mpg BMW sport touring bike in warm weather and suffer sticker shock each time I fill up at the pump with my 14-mpg Dodge Durango in the winter months. I do love the Durango because it will comfortably haul 7 people around in the nastiest weather Colorado can dish out and it can even swallow whole sheets of 4ā€™x 8ā€™ plywood. Itā€™s hard to put a price on that. But the weatherā€™s warming up now and Iā€™m itching to lean into some curvy canyon roads so it feels like it’s time to pull out the BMW.

And, if at some point if you see some dude cruising by on a geeky electric scooter with a full-faced helmet and dark face shield, it just may be me. šŸ™‚

UPDATE: 2009-01-15 After re-reading my advice to ‘buy a stock market index fund instead’ I have to confess with perfect 20/20 hindsight that no longer looks like very sound advice šŸ™